SF protests erupt: Tibet, Palestine, Biden, APEC

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Though nominally communist, China is really a capitalist empire that hates Tibet/Dalai Lama

Protests erupt around San Francisco over a Free Tibet, Free Palestine, anti-APEC, anti-Israel, anti-China, anti-Biden

(KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco) Nov. 15, 2023: There were multiple protests over a range of global causes around San Francisco today, erupting even as it rained, because of the visit of China's Pres. Xi (who is continuing the genocide in Tibet), as the APEC summit continued in the city with U.S. Pres. Biden orchestrating an appeasement and compromise trade solution to America's financial problems and the imminent loss of Taiwan as China advances in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. SF may get the spotlight, but more radical UC Berkeley is not being silent, just systematically ignored by the mainstream media. UCB students are the first to hit the pavement but are rarely mentioned anywhere outside of the Bay Area as it seems to encourage other campuses to follow suit.

• Many demonstrators braving the rain oppose APEC, which does not care about the people of Asia or the climate.
• It instead greenwashes (fakes caring about green environmental causes like the climate, industrial pollution abatement, and sustainable practices while actually doing nothing about them other than paying lip service).
• Turkey's president Erdogan declares Israel "a terrorist state"
• Many marchers are Pro-Palestine, opposing Israel's government.
• Others are here to protest China's occupation in autonomous Tibet.
• Some stand for Falun Gong, a movement oppressed by China.
• The city is liberal and leans to the left and therefore hates Biden.
• Biden is not a leftist no matter what right-wing conservatives try to say about him; rather, he is a corporate bought senile puppet who does what our ONE party system demands: the Money Party, with its two wings, wants war, more war, Big Pharma profits, and a military-industrial complex that does not much care about common citizens without healthcare or a higher education.

Tos subscribe to KTVU's YouTube channel: youtube.com/channel... KTVU delivers in-depth reports, interviews, and breaking news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area and California. Watch KTVU's newscasts on ktvu.com/live.

San Francisco protests APEC, pro-Palestine

Protesters demonstrate against world leaders, Israel's atrocities in Gaza as APEC comes to SF

(NBC Bay Area) Nov. 12, 2023: A large group of demonstrators took to the streets of downtown San Francisco on Sunday, opposing this week’s APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit. Christie Smith reports. Stay connected: Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/nbcbayarea

The problem with plastics, fake soaps (audio)

Amber Larson, Crystal Quintero, Wisdom Quarterly; Linda Mouton Howe (earthfiles.com, May 30, 2014); Cheryl Corley (npr.org, May 21, 2014)

Prof. Sherri Mason looks for microbeads in water sample from Lake Michigan. Legislation to phase out products containing the beads is pending in New York and Illinois (Cheryl Corley).

Erie microbeads (Carolyn Box/AP/5gyres.org)

From the shoreline at North Avenue Beach in Chicago, the blue water of Lake Michigan stretches as far as the eye can see. But beneath that pristine image, there's a barely visible threat, says Jennifer Caddick of the Alliance for the Great Lakes: [toxic plastic debris in the form of] microbeads.

 

These tiny bits of plastic, small scrubbing components used in hundreds of personal care products like skin exfoliants and soap, can slip through most water treatment systems when they wash down the drain.

 

Environmentalists say they're a part of the plastic pollution found in the ocean and, increasingly, in the Great Lakes, which contain more than 20 percent of the world's freshwater. Now Illinois and New York state lawmakers are a step closer to banning them.

 

Microbeads, says Caddick, engagement director for the Alliance, are "a bigger problem than we initially had thought."

 

Plastics That Look Like Food

Sherri Mason, an associate professor of chemistry at the State University of New York, Fredonia, sailed with a research team over the past couple of years to collect data on the prevalence of plastics in the lakes. They dragged a fine mesh net in the waters at half-hour intervals to snag what they could -- "anything that's bigger than a third of a millimeter," Mason says.

 

When the boat docked at Chicago's Navy Pier last summer, Mason showed off the sample bottles of microbeads that she and her team had collected in Lake Michigan.

 

Mason says her testing found, on average, 17,000 bits of tiny plastic items per square kilometer in Lake Michigan. The levels were much lower in Lake Huron and Lake Superior, but Lake Erie and Lake Ontario had much higher concentrations. LISTEN

• Do antibacterial cleansers work better than soap? 
• My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, [Probiotic]-Rich Experiment...
• An Epidemic of Absence: Understanding Allergies

Plastic Microbead Trash from Oceans to Great Lakes Hurting Birds, Marine Life — and Humans?

Linda Moulton Howe (EarthFiles.com, May 30, 2014)

“We can show that the chemicals are adhering to the plastic. We can show that organisms eat the plastic. We can show the chemicals then desorb into the organism that affects the health of THAT organism!” - Associate Prof. of Chemistry Sherri Mason, SUNY, Fredonia

• AUDIO: Report (MP3)

Trillions of plastic microbeads from human products such as toothpaste are filling up the Great Lakes and oceans with negative consequences for marine life and ultimately humans.

The Rise of China

Steve Clemons (TheWashingtonNote.com)

China's multilateral investments
One of the mistakes of Amer-ican foreign policy over the last several decades was to not heavily invest in, build, and fortify serious multilateral se-curity and economic institu-tions among Asian nations.

• Troops pour into city in China's restive west
• China's President Hu hurries home from G8 after ethnic strife
• US Gov't websites knocked out by widespread cyber attack
• Officials: North Korea believed behind cyber attacks

America has not really taken APEC [shown in green on map below] seriously and on the security front has long chosen to rely on bilateral arrangements between the U.S. and every nation we care about in Asia rather than trying to sew them together in a broader network. One exception to this has been occasional military exercises involving U.S., Japanese, Australian, and occastionally Korean forces -- but generally, America's strategy has been to secure stability in Asia through a set of robust bilateral arrangements rather than a multilateral structure, as in NATO.

One of the interesting consequences of this strategy is that it puts little pressure on the governments in these regions to mature very far beyond their dependence on U.S. forces. It also allows them to bully each other over long term cultural and historical disputes, knowing that at the end of the day that they can get away with various manipulations of the historical record -- and this goes for Japan, China, and Korea -- because America provides an ultimate buffer between them when it comes to any hot conflict.

China, however, may be leap-frogging America's anachronistic and inefficient set of bilateral deals by rooting the first serious efforts in some time of a China-centric multilateralism in the region. China has called for an annual East Asian Economic Summit and the establishment of and East Asian Community that could very well become the dominant structural fabric of Northeast and Southeast Asia.

Yes, there are other networks and forums -- including the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN plus three, and there have been efforts at economic insitution-building like former Malaysian Prime Minister's East Asian Economic Caucus. And of course, there is APEC that seems to be barely kicking anymore.

But China seems to know that there is a genuine opportunity in institution-building among a great cross-section of regional stakeholders. Frankly, this kind of diplomacy -- as we once forged together in Europe -- is exactly what Asia has needed for a long time, and in my view, the U.S. should have been at the helm of this process. Unfortunately, we have been tethered down by the constraints of our own bilateral relations, afraid of becoming less significant to our partner countries if alternative arrangements were introduced. More>>

• Here is an interesting excerpt from a Washington Post article titled "China's Quiet Rise Casts Wide Shadow" by Edward Cody.